On not disappearing against the wallpaper

I don't know how to tag this post properly. The reference in the title is to a post from seventeen years ago (yes, really!) where I wrote, in part:

I always start new jobs as The Quiet Guy ... you know, the one who tries his best to disappear against the wallpaper? Despite this, it always happens -- at every job I have ever held -- that one day I am introduced to somebody who says, "Oh, so you're Hosea. I've heard so much about you."

This post isn't about a new job. It isn't about new circumstances, or being around strangers, or anything like that. It's just a rueful reflection on my relationship with leadership.

Sometime in the middle of 2021, right around the time my salary and benefits ended from my closed work, the elected Chair disappeared from our local section of the professional society I belong to. I don't think she "disappeared" in any sense requiring the police, but at any rate she stopped showing up to meetings or answering emails. And I was asked to step in: "Hosea, you're a nice guy and you come to all our meetings anyway ... can you take over as Chair?"

Be careful whom you help. I'm still the Chair of that section today, over four years later, notwithstanding a society rule that you can only be Chair for two consecutive one-year terms before you become ineligible. But nobody else wanted the job, and our Regional Director said it's better to overshoot the term limits than to have no Chair. Anyway I have been trying—this year in particular—to get someone else to take on the job for next year.

Fine, that's nice, but so what?

Pushing and pulling

Yesterday I was scrolling through Twitter and found the following gem. Someone had posted a picture than says: "I pushed you away because I needed you to pull me close."

It sounds crazy, and part of me wants to ask "Would anybody ever do something so backwards?" But in fact I know they do. Just over thirteen years ago, I asked Wife for a divorce. We talked for most of that day, although Wife's side of the conversation included a lot of weeping, shouting, and recrimination. But at one point I asked her why she was so unhappy with the idea? Leaving aside the financial practicalities for just a minute ... isn't this what she wanted? All through our long marriage she had threatened me with divorce more times than I could count. She regularly told me she hated me. She treated me with disdain. She actively undermined me with the boys. Looking at all that history, wouldn't she be eager to get rid of me?

For a moment she looked truly shocked. Then she shouted back, "Didn't you understand? All the times I did those things, I was asking you to love me more!!"

Umm ... no, Babe. I didn't understand. I guess once again we were bad at communication.

So yeah. Have a picture.

      

My cough is back, 3

This is not me, obviously. But sometimes it feels like it might as well be.

I'm writing and posting this today to put a mark on the calendar. I hope I'm wrong, but it feels like today is the beginning of Coughing Season for me. Yes, it's the same damned allergic cough that I've complained about regularly for years (and that I've lived with regularly since long before I started complaining in these pages). Look up the posts tagged "cough" and you'll see what I mean.

Based on my calculations last spring, I guess this season—if that's what it is—should last till the end of February. Four months. That gives me hope for an endpoint.

It's funny how sharp the dividing line can be between On and Off. Over the last couple weeks I've had moments where it feels like my allergies are building up, but they have passed immediately and not returned until days later. I'm pretty sure I haven't taken a single cough drop since last February. Today I took five of them, to calm and soothe my throat. 

Just in time for the holidays, I guess. And in other news, ... I visited with Wife this afternoon and we talked very civilly for a couple of hours.

Time out for signals

I've got a bunch of posts to write and publish. Mostly they will fill in the last couple of weeks, between this one and today. Most of them are going to be back-dated.

See, back on October 8 I flew out to visit Debbie for a week. While I was there, we went to a silent retreat for the weekend, put on by a local UU Buddhist organization in her area. The prolonged time in silence helped me think about a number of things, some of which resolved themselves into blog posts that I wrote out long-hand on the airplane as I came home (October 14).

Then the very next evening (October 15), Marie arrived here in Beautiful City to spend a week visiting me. She flew home yesterday, on October 22. From this visit, I think I extracted maybe two topics to blog about.

So over the next few days I expect to post all of these topics online. I'll fit them in more or less where they belong sequentially. And I may not bother to type up the earlier ones before the later ones. So if you are watching this blog and hoping for a chronological account, you should keep the last fortnight in view all as a whole, until I get done. In the end, there will probably be six more posts added, all told: four from the visit with Debbie, and two from the visit with Marie. Of course that might change.

UPDATE 2025-10-28: OK, I've caught up now. All the back posts that I wanted to fill in the gaps in the last couple weeks have been posted. Onwards!     

     

Bad at chess

I was talking with Marie today, and she mentioned in the course of the discussion that she had never learned to play chess very well, not past the most rudimentary level. Neither have I, and it was no big deal. But then she told me why not: she found that she had a very low tolerance for losing! And of course the only way to learn to play chess well is to play a lot of it even though you start off playing badly; and that, in turn, means accepting that you are going to lose an awful lot of the time.

She also acknowledged that this low tolerance for losing might have made her life harder in other ways, but we didn't pursue it too far. (I still remembered sitting up talking a few nights ago, and didn't want to push anything too hard.) But I did start to wonder—silently, in my own mind—how far this preference had affected her other choices in life? In a post last year, I toyed with the idea of picturing Marie as a kind of atheist nun; but is it possible that she chose that path simply in order to reduce the number of direct contests she would have to fight? After all, if you never enter the arena, you can't lose. (You can't win either, but it doesn't feel to me like winning is nearly so important to Marie as not-losing.) 

Or consider her fears for many years about my continued friendship with Debbie, fears that seem only to have been put to rest recently. Of course it is more or less typical for a girlfriend to worry if her boyfriend keeps in touch with one of his exes. So maybe what is interesting is all the things that Marie didn't do. She didn't force the issue, or give me any kind of ultimatum. She didn't ask a lot of questions about Debbie, though sometimes if the subject came up she would cautiously ask one or two things before dropping the subject. Only once do I remember her ever criticizing Debbie (when I told her about how Debbie contracted COVID-19 ... I guess I never told that story here); after that I was careful to say less about Debbie and for a while she was careful to ask less. And she never overtly tried to compete.

In other words, Marie lived in fear that she was going to lose to Debbie, but she never did any of the common things that would have forced the contest out into the open. And maybe this was because she was afraid she might lose, and couldn't handle losing.

So what about me? I have remarked before that Marie and I have a lot in common, and that one thing we share is that our accomplishments are far smaller than our talents would lead you to guess. Do I share her unwillingness to lose?

It's possible. And after my ruminations last year on the concept of the Jungian Shadow (see here and especially here), I want to be careful about dogmatically asserting that I don't have this or that unappealing trait. There's always the risk that I have it but don't want to admit it.

At the same time, I don't think the data support it. Am I fearful of other things? Heavens, yes. But maybe not losing, at least not per se. When I was in high school, for example, I joined the cross-country team because I wanted to get in shape. I always came in last in all our races, but I knew in advance I was going to. It wasn't a problem. And in my long marriage to Wife, I learned that when she worked herself into a towering rage, the best thing I could do was to lose the argument. When we separated, I lost the marriage. I have put myself in the position of losing things a number of times—not as often as it would take to learn to play good chess, maybe, but still. So it is at any rate not obvious to me that this specific liability is one of mine.

Of course I have plenty of others, so there's no risk I'll run out. But it was interesting to think about.  

 

Sexualized politics

Marie and I had the strangest argument tonight ... admittedly after both of us had had way too much to drink. On the one hand it gave me what I think are some useful insights into how she thinks about politics. On the other hand, it made me despair of ever reaching a common understanding with her on the subject. It's not just about correcting this or that factual misunderstanding that she might have picked up somewhere along the way. For her ever to understand the way I see American politics—or as an alternate goal, using the famous Straussian criterion, for her ever to understand her opponents as they understand themselves—will require a total demolition and reconstruction of the furniture in her mind related to politics. It would have to start with massive cognitive dissonance and proceed through total breakdown. I don't want to inflict that on her, and I don't foresee it. But this means she will be a prisoner of her peculiar delusions for the rest of her life.

It all started when I was talking about something else. I was describing how people interpret moral topics, and I said that people respond far more than they realize to the intuitive picture in their head. So when a Malefactor does something bad, you get some people who see him intuitively as a saber-toothed tiger or a cave bear—that is to say, as a lethal threat to their friends, neighbors, and children. Then there are other people who see him as an erring child who can learn better with a little education. These two groups argue with each other over what to do with the malefactor; they quote studies and statistics, and delve deeply into academic criminology to argue their cases. But all this sophistication is window dressing. What really motivates the two groups is their intuitive picture of what is going on. Is he a saber-toothed tiger, or an erring child? On that question hinges the pragmatic decision whether he should be killed straightaway, or rehabilitated.

That was the theoretical point I was trying to make. So far, so good.

Marie stopped me to say that sometimes the roles switch. She said that in cases of rape or sexual crimes, Liberals are more likely to condemn a Malefactor as irredeemable, and Conservatives are more likely to wink and let it pass on the grounds that "boys will be boys."

Now, I had never used the words "liberal" or "conservative" in my discussion. So what I should have said is. "OK fine, that's one more example of what I'm talking about." Perhaps I could have reminded her that I never used words like "liberal" or "conservative" because I was trying to talk about a general disjunction in how people treat Malefactors, and not to make a political point. Then I should have steered the discussion resolutely back to the most general level possible.

Depressed?

I wonder if I'm depressed?

Look over the last few posts. Not exactly upbeat, are they? Now look over the last several years. Count how many posts have complained that I am stuck, becalmed, going nowhere. Do you detect a theme?

Some time ago—I guess it was back when I was still working and had medical insurance (so in 2021 or before)—I stopped taking my daily wellbutrin because I couldn't tell that it made any difference. Also I read random voices on Twitter who suggested that SSRI's are useless or worse. And since I haven't had a lot of firm commitments since my work ended, it's been hard to tell whether I'm slowing down.

But yes, I'm slowing down. I eat and drink, I browse the Internet, I sleep a lot; but I don't exercise, and compared to the time I have available I'm not very productive. Maybe the wellbutrin is the relevant factor.

At any rate, it's likely one relevant factor. Another may be my comparative isolation. When I ask Google about the consequences of prolonged isolation, it gives me an answer that includes depression, obesity, and social skills deterioration. (I'm pretty sure I can detect that last one in myself, though self-diagnosis is always tricky). And the first two linked articles—by the CDC and the APA, respectively—give a spooky list of long-term outcomes.

I'll try taking the wellbutrin again, starting after Marie goes home from her impending visit. (I don't want to change anything before then, in case of unexpected results.) I suppose this means I have to find a doctor, since my last one retired back in 2023 and I'll need a prescription. Maybe Wife has a stockpile I can hit up. But experimentation has to be the key. I hope for the best. 

So controlling, part 3

Yes, the first two posts by this name were more than ten years ago, here and here. Deal with it.

I wrote recently about the many little ways Debbie and I got in each other's way in the days leading up to the retreat. Well, they didn't end there. They peaked, if you want to call it that, while we were driving home. We had stopped to recharge her EV,* and on the way out of the parking lot I was giving her instructions at the same time that the GPS did. She asked me very pointedly if I thought that was helpful. I admitted that of course it wasn't, and added lamely that I wasn't aware I was doing it. For the rest of the day I was painfully aware of every syllable that escaped the barrier of my teeth. I was pretty aware of it the next day too.

Then this morning, as she was making breakfast,** Debbie was setting out some ingredients and said, "You can start on this, and I'll eat that." I asked, "Is that something you want me to do now, or do you mean when everything is ready?" Debbie admitted she wasn't aware she had said anything.

And suddenly the penny dropped. Some people vocalize tasks they are doing, while they are doing it. Some people imagine themselves doing a task when they see someone else doing it. So it stands to reason that some few people just start reciting instructions for things that other people are doing.Most of the time we probably contain the impulse, so that strangers don't see us standing alone talking to ourselves. But in certain kinds of liminal situations it can be unclear—even to the speaker, to say nothing of the hearer!—whether we are talking to ourselves or to others.

This, I think, must be another of the roots of Wife's insistence that I was "so controlling": a habit of talking through what someone else is doing, while she is doing it. Of course I don't do it all the time. If the task is one I don't understand, I keep quiet. And if the other person clearly has it covered, we are likely talking about something else. But especially when I am with someone who doesn't seem confident about a task that I would be confident of—or who seems to be doing it the wrong way around—I probably vocalize the task at hand. This leaves the other person the option of asking me to stop (as Debbie did), of ignoring me, or of complaining later (when there is no longer anything I can do about it) that I am "so controlling." Debbie took the first option. Wife, famously, took the last.

_____

* We had bad luck finding charging stations on the way home, with the result that we drove several miles out of our way—at least twice. The exercise convinced me that the EV-charging industry is a lenocracy, in John Michael Greer's felicitous coinage. Debbie is still convinced that electric cars are the wave of a bright, new future, and that experiences like ours are just growing pains. I look at the same data, the same experiences, and think of Greer's mordant observation, "If you want to see that the decline of a great civilization looks like, look out the window." 

** Debbie and I no longer cook together in the same kitchen. During this visit, she cooked and I washed dishes, except for the time we were at the retreat (when the retreat staff did both). 

This development has been slow but steady in coming. You remember that when I first visited her in her new state, eight years ago, we cooked together and washed dishes together. At the time I commented, "Who needs sex to be intimate, when you can work together in the same kitchen, picking up and handing off tasks smoothly and conveniently?" Two years later we were still cooking together. But by 2020, I was starting to notice slippages:

"... we didn't work together in the kitchen as smoothly and effortlessly as we have in the past, which made me realize we have gotten out of practice. Nothing serious, but we had to pay more attention not to bump into each other, and I didn't always know right away what to do next. Little things."

I don't remember how we handled cooking last year, and I can't find anywhere in this blog that I wrote it down. Not that it matters, I suppose. The Buddha teaches that all things are impermanent, after all. Right? So it should be no surprise that our ability to cook together smoothly in the same kitchen is impermanent as well.       

Silent retreat

This weekend, I'm on a silent, residential, meditation retreat with Debbie. It's just like the one I joined last year at this time; and at only a weekend it is shorter than the weeklong retreat we joined at the end of 2013. It's organized as a UU-Buddhist retreat in the state where Debbie lives.

A silent retreat isn't literally 100% silent all the time. There are instructions when you arrive, and there are occasional dharma talks. (This time around, we are watching videos by Pema Chödrön in place of dharma talks.) Also, there is a relaxation of the requirement for those who want to socialize quietly during meals, though there are still tables designated for those who want to eat in silence. And there are periods of "free time," which should be quiet but which are not policed too closely if you aren't disturbing others. But then there are meditation periods, when nobody speaks. And the whole campus "goes into silence" in the evening after the last meditation.

The purpose of silent meditation is that it allows you to watch your mind in action—particularly the repetitive scripts that keep us perpetually ill at ease—and in the run-up to this retreat I certainly had plenty to watch.

• I flew out to Debbie's place on Wednesday afternoon. Debbie spent the afternoon looking after her grandsons, and we had dinner with them and their father. (Mattie—their mother and Debbie's daughter—was late at work.) Debbie had to interrupt one of my stories because I was unaware that it was time for the kids to go to bed.
• Thursday was easy, with a couple of errands.
• Friday we drove to the retreat. So that morning Debbie decided that she had to vacuum and wipe down the entire inside of her car before we could pack it.
• Then we got in each other's way while packing—or rather, I got in her way, and we had to spend time talking about it.
• Debbie drives an EV (electric vehicle), so we had to plan the trip around where there were charging stations. There aren't a lot in her area. This part wasn't a big frustration, because I let her handle it. But it was an added challenge.
• Then there were other similar issues when we got to the Retreat Center, unpacked, and got through the first evening. If I avoid spelling them all out, that's partly because they were so trivial that they would bore you, ... and partly because they were so trivial that they would make me look really bad.
• It was all little stuff. But it was one minor irritation on top of another, all because I was running along my little tracks of automatic responses and—at least sometimes—she was running along hers. By bedtime last night I was very grumpy.

I slept long, ate breakfast alone in silence this morning, and hiked around the grounds for an hour. Then I joined the group to listen to Pema's first video, after which they rang the bell for silent meditation.

And oh—how delicious that silence was! After my grumpy and grumbling evening, after I blundered sullenly through the morning—the silence of that first sit felt like I could taste it. It was refreshing like cool water on a hot day. All of a sudden I felt, This is why I am here!*

I sat through the first two morning meditations. Then I skipped the thirs one to write this post instead. Now it's lunchtime, and maybe I'm a little less grumpy.

__________

* In fairness I should add that the other, later sits weren't all equally amazing. But the contrast that first morning was real.    

        

Another death

There's been another death this year, a woman I've known for a dozen years though not deeply. But for most of those years, I saw her regularly, once a week. I'll call her Janet, which wasn't her name in real life.

Janet and Debbie co-founded the UU Sangha that I attend regularly. During all the years up through when we suspended meeting because of COVID-19 in 2020, Janet facilitated every meeting, every week, except for the handful of times that she traveled to visit family. By the time we resumed meeting—first remotely, and then in a hybrid manner—her treatments for ovarian cancer had started taking a toll. So she was rarely there, and no longer led. Still, she was in everyone's hearts. This year Debbie traveled here (to Beautiful City, where I live) several times to visit with Janet and her family; and finally, five weeks ago, Janet died.

This is just some random UU congregation on the Internet, and not the one
Janet belonged to. But her Celebration of Life was easily this crowded.

The Sangha did an adapted Buddhist ceremony for the dead at our next meeting, and we are doing an abbreviated ceremony by Zoom once a week for the seven weeks thereafter. (Tonight is number five.) Last weekend the UU Church that hosts us (of which Janet was also an active member) held a Celebration of Life for her. In fact, Janet herself designed the Celebration of Life ceremony. There was a little Buddhist input, when the Sangha came up to the front to chant "The Three Refuges." And there was a walk through her life, with lots of photos. Several people stood up to talk about what she had meant in their lives. And there was lots of food. It was a lovely service.

Already some of the other members of the Sangha have started to think about their own deaths. (None of us is exactly young.) One woman has said she wants her service to look just like Janet's, and so she has started writing her life because nobody here knows anything about it.

Where does this leave me?

Son 1 has a girlfriend

This evening I discovered that Son 1 has a girlfriend. Of course I don't know how many others he might have had that I never knew about. I'm sure he'd never tell me. And even now, I learned of her kind of by accident.

A couple weeks ago, I sent Wife a couple of articles I'd seen about some witches who hexed Charlie Kirk shortly before he was shot. (See this link, this one [since the original article seems to have been taken down], and also this one.) She still hasn't said anything substantive about the articles, but yesterday she texted me that Son 1 had acquired a new kitten in addition to the cat I knew they already had. Then she mentioned another name I didn't know. I asked, "Who's ⸻? A third cat?" This evening, Wife replied:

No, she's Son 1's girlfriend. If he hasn't told you about her, maybe I shouldn't have. He didn't tell me either. I came home unexpectedly from a failed sleep study. I also just had a colonoscopy, but won't get the results back for a month. [Wow, nice that you managed to make it All About You again by the end of the paragraph!]

So this wasn't an Official Announcement, unlike when Son 2 called each of us in turn to announce his relationship with Beryl. This means I have no idea whether the young woman in question is a Serious Relationship, or just a casual fling that Wife happened to walk in on. (Didn't I say this would be one of the risks when Son 1 first said he was going to give Wife a place to live?)

On the other hand, I have to confess that I feel a little put out that I learned it like this. I can understand Son 1 telling nobody. But once the operation's security was compromised (so to speak), I could wish that he had wound up the job like a gentleman by notifying those who didn't know yet—namely, me. I assume that Son 2 already knows, because I think the boys talk more to each other than they do to either parent—well, except insofar as Son 1 has to coordinate basic household stuff with Wife because she lives there. But for personal things, I assume he talks to his brother first. Maybe I'm wrong.

If she's going to be a long-term item, I'd like to meet her. I wonder if I can possibly visit sometime while she's there ... maybe during the holidays? After all the obstacles I put up to Wife joining my family for the holidays, Son 1 would be well within his rights to say No. It would be no more than karma.

But maybe I can ask. 

       

Magical tales 3, bindings and blowback

I've told you some stories before about Wife's magical workings, for example here and here. Both of those posts also included commentary by John Michael Greer, after I had described some facet of the working to him. Well, I've got another. This is one I had forgotten all about until the first time (a couple years ago, I think) that I read Greer talk about bindings.

A magical binding is a spell you cast on someone else that prevents him from doing some particular thing. Greer has talked about these more than once in his blogs, as a way to illustrate a point about magical ethics that he calls "the raspberry jam principle." The principle runs like this: You can't spread raspberry jam without getting it all over your fingers or the table. In the same way, when you direct magic at somebody else, the very same energies are going to affect you too. The idea, therefore, is that you should never aim a spell at someone else that you aren't willing to undergo yourself, because sure as anything the blowback will catch you.

This also means that if you want to use magic to control someone else's behavior, you have to be very careful how you craft the spell. Greer has told the story more than once that early in his career as a mage, he was good friends with a woman who was threatened by a rapist. (I don't remember if this was her husband, or a domestic partner, or a stranger.) Greer protected her by putting a binding on this fellow that prevented him from raping. And Greer explained to his readers that he was careful to prevent the offender from raping, and not from all sexual contact. His point was that he knew the very same binding would affect him too. But he accepted that consequence, because he didn't want to rape anyone anyway! So it was no problem for him that the spell which blocked the other guy blocked him too.

Anyway, in today's Magic Monday post, someone asked about bindings again. Greer told his story. And I remembered something that had happened to Wife almost 25 years ago.

Back when the Twin Towers fell, Wife was still unambiguously Wiccan. (Her entanglement with Christianity came later.) Like many people she was angry about the attack, and felt that she wanted to Do Her Part in some way. And she hit on the idea of putting a binding on Osama bin Laden, so that he would be immobilized. So that he couldn't do anything. 

I don't know the details of the ritual. (I was generally supportive of her worship, but I wanted to stay away from this working.) I do remember that she made a doll to represent Osama, and then bound it with rope or twine—so that, symbolically, it was bound hand and foot and couldn't do anything—and tossed it in the back of the closet to sit in the dark. Doubtless there was more to it as well.

To this day, I have no idea whether her working had even the slightest effect on Osama bin Laden himself. I kind of assume not, partly because Wife was no mage, and partly because there were so many other people in the world wishing him (respectively) good or ill that I figure her spell likely got lost in the shuffle.

But interestingly enough, she got very sick after that--so sick that for the next two years or so she could scarcely crawl out of bed even just to go to the bathroom. She couldn't work. She couldn't look after the children. (We had to hire a nanny, and I didn't make all that much money. Interesting times.) In fact, she couldn't ... umm ... do anything! Wait, really?

At the time I never connected her illness with her working against Osama. But now after reading Greer for some years, I no longer treat the synchronicity as a coincidence.

I posted this story on Greer's blog. His reply was brief, but to the point:

Typical blowback. Never, ever cast a spell on anyone else you wouldn't want to experience yourself...because you will experience it, whether you want to or not.

And that, I guess, is that.